The Unalike Brothers

When you have your usually quiet brother sing and you had forgotten how good at singing he is

Back in the heyday of Hetalia, when more British Isles OCs were being developed and submitted online, there was a rather surprising amount of Wales OCs who were... well, clones of England. The nice version of England, the quieter or more nervous version. The tendency to do this has thankfully dropped a lot since then, though I don't know how to feel about people identifying the dark-haired grumpy "canon" UK brother (from that one sketch by Himaruya from 1-2 years ago?) as being Wales instead. Or the younger-looking blond UK brother from that same sketch who looks awfully a lot like New Zealand... either way, I've seen Wales in almost all shades of hair colours, from blond to red to brown to dark brown. (I don't remember seeing a black-haired Wales before, except for that one female Wales OC from aaaages ago and I'm not even sure if her hair was meant to be black)

I think the Wales OCs I always had the most issue with were the blond-haired ones. It wasn't that I was against the hair colour, it was more that I felt that most of those blond-haired Wales OCs were developed to be the spitting image of England. Very little effort went into making them different from England, they were just England's "identical twin" and it often stopped there. Maybe one Wales had longer blond hair, the other blond Wales had red streaks in his hair, and maybe that other blond Wales was the twin who liked sheep... beyond that though, their personalities wouldn't really be fleshed out. 
The thing is, the actual country Wales suffers from a lot of erasure already, most notably media erasure. (among others) There is very little common knowledge about Wales that circulates outside of the British Isles. So when I see people making Wales blond and claiming him to be England's identical twin... it cements the erasure of Wales even more? In the sense that the person developing the Wales OC sends out the message "I don't know anything about Wales, except that it's part of England." It does an enormous disservice to the Wales OC and the Welsh culture and history they're meant to represent. 

Now I'm not going to claim that I always knew better. In fact, I was probably as ignorant as the next person about Wales. If you'd ask me back in 2010 to explain the country Wales to you, I probably would have only managed to say, "It's that country with those dumb sheep jokes, it has the red dragon for a flag, it's a Celtic nation but with a language that looks like it sold almost all its vowels to another language and... that's it?" I didn't know a third of what I know about Wales now. I only started reading more on the country Wales as I was developing my Wales OC and that's when I realized that Wales was a ridiculously underappreciated country. It has so many unique aspects to its culture and the language is downright gorgeous.

For me Wales and England are brothers who are visually different from each other because they're culturally quite distinctive from each other. Sure they'll share some similarities (like the eyebrows~) since they're neighbouring countries, but they still have very distinctive cultures and languages. No one would listen to Welsh and claim that it sounds like English. Even the way people talk in those countries differs and at least from the Welsh people I've met, they have muscial lilts in their accents that I haven't heard elsewhere. The mentalities between these two countries differs as well and there are just various cultural expressions that are unique between those two countries. As I said, they do share similarities. That's why I like regarding them as brothers, they share enough similarities for that kind of closeness to be possible. But the closer you study their cultures and history, the more you realize the significant differences between them and why Wales deserves far more attention than he currently receives. 
(btw this sketch is almost a year old and I recall using a kind of reference for the faces... I hope no one will think ill of me for doing so, I think I will start using references a bit more to develop my style further)

(and yikes I wrote so much)